khayyam and anyone else responding to the troll the only way to win with a troll is not to respond to them.

They aren't interested in logic, or seeing the others view, they're only interested in getting responses,
and as long as you feed the troll (with reponses) they will continue to stay around.

Well said. I think this is an appropriate time for an aside about fighting trolls effectively (no names mentioned because they'll run off to flood the report thread again as soon as their passive-aggressive attempts at deflecting blame become unsustainable):

The troll in question's favourite tactic here and on the mailing lists is called a "gish gallop". The way to win against this is not to not respond to those posts, but to not even bother reading them in the first place. The whole point is that they want you to become fatigued and frustrated reading walls of text, where concepts that could be expressed in half a dozen words are buried in entire paragraphs of circular logic, repetition and awkward literary contortions. Their goal is to attack you "between the lines" so that you can't easily stop them by pointing to any direct quote as wrongdoing.

If you're feeling particularly black-hatty, doing the inverse of what you suggested — responding to their posts "directly" but not actually bothering to read them — is a highly effective counter-DoS using their own tactics. But don't do that in a salvageable thread, it annoys others.

I think this is an appropriate time for an aside about fighting trolls effectively (no names mentioned because they'll run off to flood the report thread again as soon as their passive-aggressive attempts at deflecting blame become unsustainable):

The troll in question's favourite tactic here and on the mailing lists is called a "gish gallop". The way to win against this is not to not respond to those posts, but to not even bother reading them in the first place. The whole point is that they want you to become fatigued and frustrated reading walls of text, where concepts that could be expressed in half a dozen words are buried in entire paragraphs of circular logic, repetition and awkward literary contortions. Their goal is to attack you "between the lines" so that you can't easily stop them by pointing to any direct quote as wrongdoing.

Never heard of that, but it is startlingly accurate. It's like reading the last 3-6 months of "discussion" summed up.

Quote:

If you're feeling particularly black-hatty, doing the inverse of what you suggested — responding to their posts "directly" but not actually bothering to read them — is a highly effective counter-DoS using their own tactics. But don't do that in a salvageable thread, it annoys others.

Yeah don't do that at all, imo. It's like that old saying someone first told me in the McCreesh context:
"Don't fight with an idiot, as he'll only bring you down to his level, and beat you at being an idiot" (roughly translated);
and then you'll look like an idiot, too. After all you put lots of energy and time into behaving like one. ;)

I think this is an appropriate time for an aside about fighting trolls effectively (no names mentioned because they'll run off to flood the report thread again as soon as their passive-aggressive attempts at deflecting blame become unsustainable):

Them?
I have done it for me as a forum user.
The "holy warrior" attitude of you and your herd is damaging the forums.
Don't you see how farcical it is to declare it a warzone?
Damaging to the point PaulBredbury contributes his systemd_without workarounds at archlinux._________________fun2gen2

The "holy warrior" attitude of you and your herd is damaging the forums.

Holy Warrior?

Refresh my memory who started calling people haters, luddites, nazis?
And now "holy warrior" implying some type of religious frenzy.

You started the name calling, then apologized, then started again and you are still doing it.
Now it's stupid reports of "boo hoo hoo, the admins are the bad guys"
None of which does anything to keep from harming the forum.

I accused
- pretending to hate Redhat but using Lvm2
- attending prayers of a new "Anti-LP church"
- promoting an attitude like a "holy warrior"

All of it, because I really don't know what is going on. Why are Gentoo developers, when showing up in the forums, constantly attacked for being a messenger? Why is this the battlefield against systemd?

I do courtiously apologize sometimes, but I cannot remember the last time._________________fun2gen2

@Ulenrich
I have been following the debate for some time now, purely to gain knowledge on the options and impact the future direction of Gentoo may bring. I have not wanted to get involved in the debate because my knowledge and experience barely qualifies me to do so, but frequent comments along the line of the following compel me to do so

ulenrich wrote:

I accused
- pretending to hate Redhat but using Lvm2
- attending prayers of a new "Anti-LP church"
- promoting an attitude like a "holy warrior"

IMHO you have been the number 1 reason for the debate constantly veering off track with comments that often have no relation to the ongoing debate

ulenrich wrote:

All of it, because I really don't know what is going on.

Then why get involved?

ulenrich wrote:

Why are Gentoo developers, when showing up in the forums, constantly attacked for being a messenger?

I don't believe they are, the obtuse and circular arguments annoy some in the debate and are called out.

ulenrich wrote:

Why is this the battlefield against systemd?

Is it a battlefield against systemd? The parties you accuse have frequently stated that they merely want to retain the init options uncompromised in Gentoo, therefore if it is to be classified a battlefield then it would be more appropriate to label it for the continued inclusion of openrc etc

ulenrich wrote:

I do courtiously apologize sometimes, but I cannot remember the last time.

Perhaps you should consider doing so more often?

That said, sections of the debate have been very educational and I'd like to thank all those that have made a positive contribution

I have done it for me as a forum user.
The "holy warrior" attitude of you and your herd is damaging the forums.
Don't you see how farcical it is to declare it a warzone?
Damaging to the point PaulBredbury contributes his systemd_without workarounds at archlinux.

LMAO. Thanks I needed that. I'm off to fight in the jihad against systemd that has been called by all mullahs of the Unix Way. Woe be unto to you apostate from the Craft of Software Engineering, for your installations will be brought down by the weight of the Sin of Spaghetti Coding..

Seriously, man, get over yourself, get out more and get some fresh air. The mind requires the body to have a clear circulation, not simply the dregs of what's left in the head being recycled over and over.

While I had initially taken this to be rather more satirical than a literal call to action, others apparently have a less forgiving interpretation in mind. As such, a response is called for.

Ant P. wrote:

If you're feeling particularly black-hatty, doing the inverse of what you suggested — responding to their posts "directly" but not actually bothering to read them — is a highly effective counter-DoS using their own tactics.

Reading a bit between the lines here, the user apparently in question has contacted me in regards to this issue, entirely to my satisfaction. There is no call for attempting to bait him, or anyone else, into a debate from which none gain and it just makes more work for the resident cat herders.

Granted, there are still some who could use a healthy dose of behavioral calibration in regards to certain issues which have been repeatedly discussed to death. However, unless you are attempting to complete an apprenticeship under a vernacular necromancer, there seems little reason to bury the discussion again, even if others appear to be working toward their own rhetorical zombie armies.

Ant P. wrote:

But don't do that in a salvageable thread, it annoys others.

Better still, do not do it at all. Some of us have to read all of that, regardless.

You're right, I was only trying to add amusement to a situation where it turns out quite a few people are treating it as some sort of deathly serious battle for honour... terrible idea in hindsight.

I'm not even sure what they're fighting over any more, the meaning seems to have been lost in the hundreds of screenfuls of crap across every active forum that I find myself accidentally clicking on with annoying frequency. This used to be a nice site with a great signal/noise ratio, what happened?

But I apologise for inadvertently adding to the moderator load like that. The last thing I want is to be part of this problem, so I'm going to end all involvement with it right now

"Don't fight with an idiot, as he'll only bring you down to his level, and beat you at being an idiot"

I believe Mark Twain said it best; “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”

Unfortunately, I'll readily admit to heeding that advice less and sometimes passionately doing duty calls. Pretty sure it's an age thing (2 decades ago I wouldn't have bothered) coupled with holding certain forums, like these, in higher regard. I also remember a time when USENET was far more professional in actual discussion (where I did participate) than the Internet of 'whatever' today.

I believe Mark Twain said it best; “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”

Ah that sounds like much better English, indeed :)

Quote:

Pretty sure it's an age thing (2 decades ago I wouldn't have bothered) coupled with holding certain forums, like these, in higher regard.

Heh yeah as you get older you start to want to pass info along; and as you say where you have a lot of respect for the community, it's natural to want affirmation and validation. I actually love that image of everything someone types on IRC effectively being "validate me, validate me"; sometimes it really comes home as being the true content of a lot of discussion.

Quote:

I also remember a time when USENET was far more professional in actual discussion (where I did participate) than the Internet of 'whatever' today.

Yup Computing used to be full of geeks interested in it, and not much more, just the odd business-head trying to make a buck out of data-processing. You don't see that term bandied around much more at all. I'm all for more people using computers, I just wish they wouldn't pretend to be experts at it. ATM we're being told to hand over the infrastructure to plumbers who've never even used a wrench; in fact they think they're frightfully boring and traditionalist, and have invented an overblown swiss-knife of a tool to do everything the wrench does, plus everything your hammer and screwdriver do too (and a whole lot more!)

Granted it's not very good at any of those, but they expect everyone else to help them fix the "design" in real-world operations, so that they can patent it back to us later, and if we burst a boiler, well that's the price of progress.. we should be grateful that they allowed us to participate, and happy to pay with our time, our money, our skills and our sanity for the privilege of ushering in the "new" wave of consumers-not-users. "What do you mean, you don't like my new clothes? You must be stupid."

I also remember a time when USENET was far more professional in actual discussion (where I did participate) than the Internet of 'whatever' today.

Yup Computing used to be full of geeks interested in it, and not much more, just the odd business-head trying to make a buck out of data-processing. You don't see that term bandied around much more at all. I'm all for more people using computers, I just wish they wouldn't pretend to be experts at it.

Navar, steveL, et al ... BBS and then USENET is where I started out, I remember comp.os.unix being something of a education, both technically and socially. Yes, that "professionalism" has somewhat dissipated, as has the idea that more experienced users were a resource that "newbies" could access but that this access required them to abide by the standards expected by that community. It didn't always work, where there are humans they invariably bring with them various conflicts, but overall the community managed to function ... and there were many a golf tournament :)

Those same communities (not just the individuals but the ethos generated) built and sustained linux, it was the users (in the form of all the free labour provided) who made the linux distribution viable, they provided the technical support and expertise that no distribution could possibly function without. The linux world that we see today was built by these users (and other free sources of labour, such as all the small scale projects too numerous to mention) and not the distributions. Once (some) distributions were able to turn this free labour into a revenue stream this provided them with a certain level of political power to stand above that community and to direct development toward ... no surprise ... further revenue streams. This process has marginalised the user (who comes with their own level of skill, needs, wants, etc ... that is, an *actual user* and not an abstraction) and shifted the emphasis toward an idea (developed predominantly by Apple) of "usability" (or what I call "disability design") which pre-conditions the role expected of the user (essentially someone whos knowledge never develops past the interface and so remains at a level which a dependence on the "design" makes of them ... consumers). The democratisation of computing is fine, everyone started out knowing nothing, but the abstraction of this user, and creating of them a captive audience, is precisely the mechanism that undermines what made the community possible ... its a contradiction that essentially says: "we no longer need you, click here to buy back your labour".

There are distributions that do have a strong social connection to (and reliance on) their users, gentoo being the obvious one to mention, but I still hear developers occasionally utter the mantra "code talks, bs walks" as if all the things users provide are of little value when compared to "code". It was this very idea I was trying to point at in another post.

Ah I missed that in the other post, khayyam, as I got distracted by the whole tags debate, which was just a humorous aside.

Yes, you're absolutely right: the whole point of Free software is that it's the users who end up doing all the work, and further becoming the programmers of the future. Everyone who codes on a computer, started out using them. I guess the difference is that nowadays there's lots of people involved with it for reasons other than because it's what they do, and always will, no matter what. You see that tendency in other walks of life, like medicine: some people are in it for the vocation, and some people for what they can get out of it.

RMS was right though, and this discussion bears him out, imo. Since the users are the ones who spend the time making the software work, collaborating with each other on workarounds and fixes, with some of them focussing on programming, others on QA, others on documentation, some on support, and so on, it's only right that we insist on licensing which protects our rights. The recent (as in last ten years or so) trend has been toward a pooh-poohing of the stuff that came before, as if "everything's different now, so just use a BSD/MIT license that means we can leech with impunity, shiny shiny."

You gotta laugh sometimes though, at the knots they tie themselves in. Right now they seem to spend more time obsessing about concepts, than the fact that the dependency hell means they have layers of interconnected bugs, and users just get referred to three other bug reports, while the journal brings the system to a crawl. (The fix: use rsyslogd instead, last I heard.. lul) And always the mantra of "patches welcome" as if anyone serious is, or would be, interested in "patching" a turd of a design.

"Amateur" doesn't begin to describe it, afaic, whoever might be putting their name to such nonsense, and however much they might have done as an "evangelist for linux". The end result is that users spend about 5 years and an awful lot more human-hours than is necessary, to rework borked software, and get what could have been achieved much more simply with a clean design from the start. It's that waste of effort that I find irksome, especially because it saps the energy out of us all (and isn't that handy.)